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One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon¡¯s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ¡°I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.¡±
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Something very similar I often felt during my explorations of gardens that formerly belonged to painters and other artists: I am looking at plants, statues, cobbled roads that looked at these artists.
Gardens can be seen as extensions of the mindset of creative people like scholars and artists, who may have formed their ideas while enjoying the space surrounding their homes. This is most clear in cases with a connection between the artist and the garden. For example, artistic gardens often involve more than just flowers or grass, following a deliberate lay-out or being decorated with statues and sculptures. Or the garden directly served as the object of a painter¢¥s or a writer¢¥s work.
A few years ago I visited the gardens outside the hospital in Saint Rémy, France, where Vincent van Gogh spent the last years of his life. Looking at the photos I took on that occasion, I realised that these surroundings, which Van Gogh watched daily through the window of his room, are not only seen by modern tourists, but are indirectly known to a much wider audience through Van Gogh¢¥s paintings. Van Gogh has immortalised them, as it were, and in doing so has put his own stamp on them.
Why should anyone be interested in the gardens, or indeed the lives of artists at all? A first reason is perhaps best characterised as simple voyeurism – curiosity about the lives of other people. Walking through streets, I have always enjoyed peeking through the windows to see how people live. So how did and do intellectual and artistic minds live? What a pleasure to walk around in their gardens, then, if only after their deaths.
But that is not all. Philosophical-minded people may also have expressed their worldviews through horticulture. The Zen tradition of Japan aimed to model its gardens as a miniature of real geography, representing mountains, rivers and fields by means of rocks, plants and little waterways. In Europe, Britain in particular is renowned for its gardening tradition. Can something of the spirit of English painters still be detected in the design of their gardens? That is a deeper question I have aimed to raise with these images.
A final reason I felt drawn to this project was that impressions of the gardens of these artists, just like their homes, is one way to keep their memories alive. I like to believe my work in its own way contributes something to the immortalisation of these creative spirits.
The project falls apart into two different approaches. The first approach focusses on the gardens themselves, the second on modern visitors of these gardens. |
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